Tag Archives: zookeeper

Architecting distributed systems can be very difficult. Arguably the hardest part of programming a distributed application is getting node coordination correct. I’ll define a node in this context as a service running on a single server which communicates with other nodes and together make up your distributed application.

What I mean by coordination here is some act that multiple nodes must perform together. Some examples of coordination:

Group membership

Locking

Publisher/Subscriber

Ownership

Synchronization

One or more of these primitives show up in all distributed systems, so implementing them correctly is extremely important. While developing CRAQ, I originally implemented a very simple group membership service, but it didn’t provide reliability, replication, or scalability and was therefore a single point of failure. I went looking for an out-of-the-box coordination service and came across ZooKeeper.

ZooKeeper is an open-source, reliable, scalable, high-performance coordination service for distributed applications – just what I was looking for. It provides a metadata warehouse that is indexed like a file system and its primitive operations allows programmers to implement any of the common coordination examples I mentioned above. It has client bindings for Java and C, which made it relatively easy for me to integrate into CRAQ’s source code which is written in Tame.

The only thing I wish ZooKeeper had was support for wide-area deployments. I’m hopeful that this might eventually get added (maybe even by me!) some day.

I highly recommend ZooKeeper for anyone who is considering building a distributed system. It simplifies one of the hardest parts of implementing a distributed application.